Chinatown

This is one of those movies I know so well and love so much (and I know I'm not alone), I have almost nothing to say about it. Truth be told, I put this on while I put away my laundry, thinking I'd be interrupted long before it was over, but a delay in plans allowed me to finish it. Can't argue with the chance to sit through a classic.

Everything here moves so smart, with not a single wasted frame of picture or word of dialogue, it's no wonder they use this as the example of a "perfect" screenplay or a "perfect" film production. The themes are tight, the characters are so interesting, and the story works so well -- I want to say the plot lacks a single hole or inconsistency, but you know what? there may be many (I was always unclear why Ida Sessions knew about the obituary names, for example). Even if there are copious plot holes, though, it feels intuitively right. It feels consistent. It's even got totally reasonable red-herring rabbit holes for Jake to fall down, so the final twist doesn't feel like a cheat.

What do you want me to say? I absolutely fucking love this movie. There are a number of movies I can tell you why I love, but I can't be objective about. Movies like Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, Blade Runner. These are examples of my top-tier movies, movies I'm mostly willing to just love without bias. Sometimes I wish I had more of them.

La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)

It's hard to think of a more surreal, alien approach to a story about aliens than this. It opens in media res on a silent, terrified human holding an infant and racing away from nightmarish, dangerous things (animals? plants? geometric oddities?) on an endless plain. She thinks she finds safety in the high ground, but a massive blue finger prods her roughly back down the hill. She races up again, looking to be safe, but the finger prods her once more. This continues, a sort of inverse Sisyphus, until the finger grows bored. It lifts the woman into the air, high high into the air, and drops her. She tumbles and dies. The baby is alone and scared. We pull back to reveal the hand belongs to a strange blue creature (a Traag) that looks like Dr. Manhattan bred with a humanoid fish. The story then shifts perspective to these massive, psychic mysterious creatures, and a child named Tiwa who adopts the baby. We watch for a while as she dresses it up in preposterous humiliating outfits, but the baby is a tiny pet, no bigger than a hamster. The baby doesn't know any other way of life.

Traag time moves slower than Om (homme, or human) time, which gives the story a really novel arc as Terr (the baby, whose name is apparently short for terrible but also evokes the word Terre, the French word for Earth) grows into a boy and eventually a man, while Tiwa and the other Traags don't age much at all. In typical future-dystopian fashion Terr escapes and lives among the wild Oms (living in the park!), and his unique skills (knowledge and education) first cause strife within the group but eventually turn the tides and help them win the war. Of course, things are much, much stranger than that when you watch it.

Apart from a surprisingly abrupt conclusion (and some cheating narration throughout which is mostly forgivable), Fantastic Planet is an inspired story. It belongs in the same camp as classic science fiction like Dune and Solaris. It's maybe the smarter, artsier cousin of Planet of the Apes or The Matrix. I'd actually have liked to see them go further with many aspects (I had this same reaction to another kindred spirit: TRON) but overall, I'm totally impressed.

I could go on about the animation style and the music -- both feel dated but perfectly suited to the piece -- but I feel I've run on long enough. Suffice to say it's a great film, maybe a genius one. If you've never seen Fantastic Planet but you like science fiction -- I mean real science fiction, not just robots and aliens being used as a delivery system for explosions and chase scenes -- I think you owe it to yourself to see this film.

Cat People

Although I watched this for its reputation of remaining scary without "showing the monster," what actually struck me was the characterization. They're all sympathetic, not flat at all (though a bit hokey), especially poor tortured Irena, consumed by passions and a fear of those passions -- so irresistible to men that even her shrink turns into a creep who must have her, but unable to love for fear of devouring anyone she loves -- whether out of an uncontrollable impulse toward violence or a monstrous jealousy, it's a little unclear. The whole movie she keeps telling people the truth, but nobody will believe her. In fact this debate consumes the story so much that much of the tension comes not from waiting for someone to die but from wondering if maybe she is crazy after all, and maybe she keeps letting that leopard at the zoo out instead. Plenty of clues cleverly point to that, leaving both possibilities -- that she's a Serbian cat-woman, or that she's a looney with a stolen key to the leopard cages -- perfectly feasible right up to the final moments of the film.

I've no doubt some pretty intricate theories can be pulled from this film -- anthropological, gender studies, metaphors about married life and jealousy and fidelity -- but I was actually watching for more surface reasons. I wanted to see tension and horror; I wanted to see character arcs. I was given both. Some things when watching felt a little aw-shucks and movie-real (as opposed to real-real, I guess?), but upon reflection they worked for the story pretty well.

Great photography, nice pacing, decent story. Not terribly scary (but I bet it was for its time) and not terribly deep (but not so shallow as to feel like a B-movie). It did everything it aimed for, and smartly. Very little to complain about, actually. Nice work, Tourneur & Lewton!

I'm Still Here *

It's difficult to say if I'd have viewed this the same way if I'd seen it before Casey Affleck admitted it was all fiction. Not to brag (is this even brag-worthy?) but I never doubted for a second if it was real or not. The moment Joaquin Phoenix started showing up in public looking like the lead singer from the Eels with Casey Affleck smirkingly chasing him with a camera, it seemed like a self-indulgent film project being shot in public. How could it be anything else? And while it turns out that self-indulgence is naturally one of the main themes here, an even bigger one is complacency and voyeurism. "JP" turns in on himself and disappears into his own navel, and we loyally follow him in.

It's a sneaky film about celebrity culture. About the boundlessness and ennui of being a celebrity and the cold excitement of vultures who surround celebrities. At no point in the story does anybody ever once say, "Hey, dude, I think you're making a mistake," let alone, "Hey man, are you all right?" Not his assistants, not his friends, not other actors and celebrities, not the media who eagerly report on his seeming descent into madness, and not the fans or internet public who relish the chance to tear him apart. One of the most telling scenes is when he finally gets up to rap in a club in Miami. The experience is fascinating in an outsider-art way, but the rapping is obviously sloppy, and his performance seems to come through a drug haze. He's angry, slurring, mumbling lyrics about how hard it is to have everything. Most of the audience laughs or stands in shock -- but almost everybody has a cellphone or point-and-shoot camera trained on him. Then Joaquin loses it to a heckler, leaps off stage and gets in a fight with him. This isn't staged (it may be planned, but it's diving into a live crowd), and as the two brawl and beefy security dudes sweep in to stop the ordeal, the entire crowd turns to the fight, cameras still pointed at the action. It's a celebrity beating someone up, a would-be-rapper totally out of control, but the tone of the audience is exactly the same as before. Now the action's over here instead of over there. They still have "oh my god" smiles on their faces, thrilled to be capturing this. These people are not actors. There's only one (known) actor in the room here, but the telling performance comes from everyone around him, caught in the undertow.

The only reason I wonder if my experience would change if it were still claiming veracity is because a good deal of watching I'm Still Here gets devoted to an unconscious guessing game of who's in on it and who's being fooled. I guess that's part of the point: with celebrity culture you never know who takes you at your word and who just glad-hands you and plays the yes-man -- but I found that aspect of watching and wondering a little exhausting.

The editing and photography was occasionally bland or workmanlike (after all, it's "cinema verité") but was at least as often surprising and evocative. The closing moments -- the entire end sequence of traveling to Hawaii (?) to see his father -- was beautiful and telling. Overall I went in with low expectations and came out thoughtful and moved, despite the raucous Borat-style antics throughout. Which I guess is as good a mark of success as any.

Seen at the Hollywood Theater.

The Jacket

This is a curious film. I don't know the actual story of its production (I may look into it after writing this, or I may just leave my assumptions alone), but it feels like one of those movies that barely got made. The story concept is generally strong, but the grandfather-paradox-heavy patness smacks of young screenwriter to me (ahem). The performances are a little uneven but generally good, and the cast is certainly great, but the dialogue and characterizations (particularly motivation) are a little too easy, glib, or unnatural. The photography is a little too flashy, especially when it leans uncomfortably on high-contrast extreme close-ups of the lips or eyes of Adrian Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Kris Kristofferson. For me, the editing consistently drew attention to itself, which as they say defines bad editing ("the invisible art"). But it's not like this is a bad movie, at all. Just a very calculated movie. A very designed, constructed, anti-naturalistic one.

The Jacket reminds me of The Butterfly Effect or The Machinist or maybe a Natali film like Splice or Cube (that's the second time I've been reminded of Cube recently). It's dark, high-concept, stylized in a sort of generic way, and the story never quite gels, never quite earns plausibility, but feels somewhat worth watching anyway. It's a good movie that doesn't seem to have any idea how to be (or maybe any hope of being) a great movie.

Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

It's interesting to note that in this, the film that made Clint Eastwood, the actor looks just a little too pretty-boy to be believed as the badass stranger he's meant to play. Because he went on to embody this archetype so absolutely over the next two decades, there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in watching him here. It's like watching a man in an ill-fitting suit, even though you've seen that man in the very same suit dozens of times and you know it's a perfect fit.

A cursory glance through Wikipedia tells me that this was Leone's first spaghetti western, and that it was early in the genre's life, which makes sense. Like Eastwood it feels like the genre and the director are both finding their footing here. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's definitely got something. I wonder how we'd view Fistful if it hadn't been followed by For a Few Dollars More and of course, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, among so many others. If Leone and Eastwood hadn't gone on to be the defining names of this type of storytelling. Taken on its own merits, it's a western remake of Yojimbo (itself an adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest, such an awesome road from mobsters to samurais to the old west), and it's got a lot going for it but it's also clearly a b-movie in a b-movie genre; it doesn't quite transcend. It's impossible for me not to see this through the eyes of someone who's seen later, greater works in the genre, not to mention who's acutely familiar with the source materials that led us here. Trying to view it as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fine, but that's about it.

Also, this film influenced more than just the stylistic choices of Leone's later films and spaghetti westerns in general. Eastwood would later direct two films of his own, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, about a stranger who rides into a corrupt town, fights the forces that be with cold brutality and shifting allegiances, and then rides back out at the end. In fact, if memory serves, he remains nameless in both films and they're implied sequels to The Man With No Name. More to the point, though, I found both of them to be stronger films than A Fistful of Dollars, definitely the work of a man with a firm grip who'd found his voice and his style. But I guess it all started here.

Devil *

Right off the bat I could tell two things about Devil, before we've even met our characters. The first thing I could tell came from the disorienting, slightly thrilling title sequence photography, which consisted of helicopter shots of (what I assume was) Philadelphia upside down! The shots were really effective, in that I felt affected by them, but I couldn't tell you to what end, and the more of them they showed me the more I couldn't help but try and find meaning in them. It's an upside-down world? We already live in an underworld of sorts? Going down is not as safe as it seems? Yeah, nothing. So the first thing I knew was, this movie was going to occasionally do something because it was cool or evocative or pretty or disorienting without really giving much thought to what that really meant. This was not a surgically precise film, it was a sledgehammer. This was not the tightly controlled sniper picking off a very specific target, it was a shotgun blast.

The second thing I could tell came from the voiceover, which would come back throughout. In general, common wisdom in screenwriting is, voiceover is bad. Voiceover is awful. Voiceover is, as they say, the devil. It's lazy writing, often telegraphing or shorthanding more complicated things and rushing the story to the audience in the least engaging way possible: by outright telling them. There is a reason lectures are so poorly attended; writers please take note that if you are going to just tell me stuff, it had better be really amazing stuff. Many films have made use of voiceover narration to prove it can be done wisely. Wings of Desire, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club, The Informant!, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, off the top of my head, all use it in unique and worthwhile ways. Devil tries to. Devil fails. The voiceover continually updates us on a preposterously specific and relevant "series" of bedtime stories, folklore of the devil that's so concrete and exact that all other accounts of the devil should hereby be dismissed as hogwash, because they don't involve five people in a room together with one of them being an impostor; they don't happen out in public, which is clearly how the devil would pull his tricks (and does, if you believe Rodriguez's mother [or grandmother's?] stories). The voiceover also telegraphs events in a way meant to be suspense-building but in fact neutralizes any chance of surprise throughout. Comments like "Also he kills bystanders trying to help" and "He always makes sure a loved one comes to see the last death, to 'make us doubt everything' " really kill any chance for the movie to surprise me.

Whenever we would cut to the drama inside the elevator, or at least inside the building, I was passingly engaged in the characters, though hoping for more. But I would check out at best, groan at worst, whenever we hit a new chapter mark and the latino security guard's voiceover would kick in with some weird little gem that was way, way too exact to be in "every story" his crazy mom/grandmom would tell him at night (how boring for this kid to hear variations on such a rigid formula! it'd be like watching a whole lot of romcoms or action movies or contained thrillers back to back! oh wait...). So the movie for me moved in mildly aggravating fits and starts.

Somewhere in there is an interesting story, but it would have to have the devil premise (which is the whole point, unfortunately) completely exorcised. Even a supernatural killer would be okay, but it can't be Satan please. Focus on the characters and the drama and not on the cliff's-notes narration and you might find something worth filming. The dialogue and acting and containedness of it all reminded me of Cube, which also flirted with being a better movie than it was, but actually came a lot closer. In the end, Devil was short enough that I don't regret seeing it, but it was neither scary enough, engaging enough, or intelligent enough to justify itself for me, as-is. M. Night stories are just too obvious, too blunt, and collapse too easily under even the slightest of scrutiny. This is no exception.

But man, it feels like it's been a while since I watched a movie.

Seen at Century 16 Eastport.

Bad Lieutenant

This was interesting to watch immediately after the Herzog film. For one, I think there's a little more remake going on that they admit. Although the primary crime and the third act are definitely different, and the central themes are clearly more spiritual in Ferrara's and more moralistic in Herzog's, the stories share an awful lot of similarities, like the sexual abuse of authority, the gambling-himself-into-a-hole subplot (and the requisite sympathetic bookie) and the twisted way the title character can't let go of his case.

As I said earlier, the new one feels like it riffs on the same themes but tells a different story. Cage's Bad Lieutenant and Keitel's Bad Lieutenant are both self-destructive, brutal monsters of men, both driven by a weird anti-hero's moral principles (almost a noir-hero's sense of right and wrong taken to telling extremes). But where Cage's character seems to be reptilian in nature, an aggressive walking id trying to stay one step ahead of the terrible wake he leaves behind him, Keitel's character's is haunted by a sickening loss of faith and a repentant respect for and guilt from his religion. I'm not sure which is simpler, but they're drastically different.

(One quick tangential note, thrown here in the middle because I had no way to connect it to the other comparisons I've made here: Nicolas Cage's slowly-deteriorating voice and body language reminded me increasingly of Woody Harrelson's Larry Flynt, in a way that I always chalked up to heavy pain-killer use distorting one's ability to speak. Nonetheless both times I was reminded of it. Here, Harvey Keitel's character reminded me a ton of his role in the other film he did in 1992: Mr. White from Reservoir Dogs. They are both mean-spirited quasi-good-guys who kill and steal and cheat but have strong moral backbones, and they both break down into sobs in almost exactly the same way. It's almost disappointing, because the two characters lose a bit of distinction when placed side by side, and both movies came out the same year, so. Yeah. Anyway. Just something I thought of, comparing the heroes of these two movies to other well-known characters.)

The end of this one, the first Bad Lieutenant, stands in contrast as well. In Port of Call Nicolas Cage's hero (McDonagh) pushes past some threshold of immorality and comes out miraculously, impossibly clean -- and ready to start the pushing all over again. In Ferrara's film, Harvey Keitel's nameless hero comes off to me as more furious at the world, daunted by its miracles, and lost when confronted with grace. He's a man who expects the savage, merciless law of the jungle to prevail, and crumples when he has to face greater powers than himself, forces of good and forgiveness. Or that's what this atheist pulled from the Catholic-heavy imagery. Maybe someone more spiritual can do more with that. In the "original," he is "redeemed" by helping the rapists escape, and then he is released from further sin by murder. In the "not-remake," if he is "redeemed" it is by discovering the cold, morality-free nature of nature, and committing enough "evils" that eventually something came up "good," and he is pointedly not released from further sin at all. In fact, it is implied he stands on the cusp of beginning again, though this is left open to interpretation.

Although both are pretty good films, story-wise there's no question which I'm a bigger fan of. Moral righteousness in the face of a Catholic ideal of guilt and baptism vs. moral ambiguity in the face of a capricious and arbitrary world? Yeah. Sorry, Mr. Ferrara. You made a great movie, and a brilliant character study, but put me on Team Herzog.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans

I liked this when I saw it last year in theaters, even more than I thought I was going to. Nicolas Cage gives not just a typically batshit performance; he gives a surprisingly nuanced batshit performance. He gives us a character that actually evolves and develops throughout the story, and it's fascinating to watch.

The script is fun as hell, too. I admit to not yet having seen Abel Ferrara's original (edit: Now I have), but I know this isn't a remake at all. It feels -- and this is clearly wild speculation -- more like riffing on a theme than any kind of homage or remake. And to that end, this story about a "bad cop" who keeps pushing further is great. There's so much tension in watching someone pulled tighter and tighter and waiting for everything to snap, explode, collapse.

But the story here is smart. The moral world of Port of Call is complex and unnavigable. Even the good cops play loose and dirty with the law. The authority doesn't really get involved, and the worst punishment seems to involve being kicked out of the game -- and even that is shockingly temporary. The deeper into depravity Terrence McDonagh goes, the more he drags along those loved ones foolish enough to tether to him. Eventually he pushes well past the limits we even expect him to, until he seems to break miraculously though some kind of membrane and come out not just clean, but having yanked his entire world inside out with him. The bad guys get caught and/or killed, his loved ones have become a (clean?) "family," and he himself has been promoted from Bad Lieutenant to Captain.

At the end, we have two perfect codas: first, we see Terrence back on the prowl for preppie kids with easily snatched drugs and girlfriends, proving he hasn't changed his ways at all, and the cycle will continue itself; second, we see Terrence lost in a drug-haze in a hotel room, encountering Chavez, the felon whose life he saved in the prologue. It was the act of saving this man's life that transformed him -- it permanently damaged his spine and put him on pain pills (making him Bad) but also won him a promotion and the reputation of a hero (making him a Lieutenant). So this encounter at the end is a major moment -- will (or even can) Terrence be saved by the man he wrecked his own already-questionable life saving? The answer at the end is as obtuse and enervating as the iguana shots during the stake-out: it's Terrence and Chavez, sitting together against an aquarium wall. Chavez looks spaced-out, possibly bored. Terrence looks like... is he about to laugh? What is going on in his mind? Then -- "Ha!" -- a single half-chuckle, like he's about to tell you what's so funny, and then that cut to black. That's all you get.

It's morally ambiguous, but more aggressively so than films usually get, and madman poet Werner Herzog is a perfect match for the material. A lot of elements that feel like they wouldn't work really work. It's a strange movie -- what Herzog film isn't? -- and I'm glad it exists.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World *

The actual watching of the movie has parts that move too fast and others that move too slow as it rushes excitedly to squeeze as much of a six-book story as it can into its two hour running time. The beginning especially feels a little manic, and I kept thinking, "If audiences don't know this story or these characters, won't they feel a little alienated by how rapidly we're breezing through characterizations and introductions?" But remembering the movie, the choppy rhythm and subplot onslaught smooths down and registers just fine, and I left the theater pretty happy with it, over all.

I know the books, having just finished the series last week (and delaying seeing the film -- sorry box office numbers -- until I had), so I can't say. The internet's calling this the Movie Of This Generation, comparing it to Fight Club. The epithet may be generous but it's certainly not totally without cause. It says a lot in its style and attitude, just like Fight Club did about the 90s, and it does so in a fun and original and vaguely zeitgeist-y way.

They did a pretty good job of keeping all that story in there, of making the manic video-game-fighting/punk-love/comic-geek thing come alive and keeping the heart-on-your-sleeve/idiot-in-love/dealing-with-your-demons themes front and center. The casting worked really well. On that note, I've got to admit I'm pretty burnt out on Michael Cera -- I like his onscreen personality but it's just the one onscreen personality and I can only take that so many times in a row -- but he mostly didn't disappoint here, except for playing some of the high-emotion scenes a little too deadpan (as usual). Actually, I'd say that, much like how I declared Kung Fu Hustle the end of the kung-fu genre (it's all the standard elements of the genre, times 100, blown to beautifully absurd extremes), so too should Scott Pilgrim be the end of the Michael Cera persona for the same reasons. Time to close a chapter, redefine yourself, and move on. Please, Mr. Cera.

My one major complaint about this film, though, which I can't leave without expounding on, is the end. In terms of being a manic 16-bit video-game love story with a face-paced tongue-in-cheek action ending, it ends well, but compared to the book I was pretty let down. See, in the comic series, up until Book 6, I considered the series cute, fun, and amusing. Light, fluffy, but with a lot of elements thrown together that really played well off each other and spoke to our generation. I didn't love it, but I totally liked it, and I saw the appeal. But then in Book 6, I suddenly got really excited, really into it, the end was such a big thematic climax, bringing in elements and plotlines I hadn't even paid much attention to, evolving characters and making the whole video-game-fight stuff and subspace-travel stuff into metaphors for how we all deal with crazy love, especially young crazy love. Book 6 really won me, and almost all of Book 6 felt rewritten (and rewritten well, but definitely not up to the original) for the film. All I can say is, hey everybody who loved this movie? Go read the books. Worth it!

Seen at the Regal Lloyd Cinema.

Sidenote: distressingly, this has been my longest dry spell between movies. It's been a hell of a month.

Zodiac

Definitely watched for research, as I'm about to try and tell a very procedural, very visually dry short story about puzzle solving and code-breaking, but man, Zodiac is a film that never disappoints. It's not that the case isn't interesting, because it obviously and totally is, but if I were to sit and tell you how much data this film needs to work, and how many years and protagonists and loose ends and paperwork you were going to have to sit through -- not to mention revisiting all that paperwork years-of-movie-time and hours-of-screen-time later -- you would probably tell me it sounds like a boring (or again, at least dry) documentary and not very dramatic. And yet, you're not bored for even a minute watching it.

I think one of the tricks that keeps so much information working -- aside from a stellar cast of more character actors than you can shake a stick at -- is the economy of the storytelling. Entire locations, scenes, weeks of someone's life take place in a single shot, lasting as few as 5 seconds of screentime, and in each scene people are doing things (the reporter team of Avery-Graysmith seem to be always drinking or discussing drinking; the cop team of Armstrong-Toschi seem to be always eating or discussing food -- am I reading too deeply to suggest that they are ingesting clues and data in totally different ways, and that each needs the other to be fruitful and survive/solve the case? in fact when Graysmith starts working with Toschi he repeatedly has to buy him meals in order to gain his cooperation and trust), but the entire scene, location and everything, is over in three or four lines of dialogue, tops. Then we move on to the next clue. There's very little to distract you (that isn't meant to distract you), but at the same time the characters and world all feel lived in, inhabited. Many moments end just as a character-related moment is about to begin. For example, at the theater, after Graysmith awkwardly fails to connect with Toschi, we slowly fade out while Melanie is just walking into frame and up to Graysmith. We get a real sense that the character drama is unfolding just outside the bounds of what we're being shown, which keeps the story from feeling dry and bare-bones, keeps the sense of a reality and a timeline while letting us focus on the meat of the story, on the mystery and the clues. Partner shorthand and quirky details (animal crackers; Aqua Velvas) keep the banter from being stale. Brilliant actors breathe life into their necessarily-few scenes. In short, everything works just right in this film, moves just exactly as it would have to for Zodiac not to be a boring info-dump of a movie.

On a more personal, less critical-eye note, it's frustrating that Fincher went from top of his game (The Game, Seven, Fight Club, The Panic Room, Zodiac) to Benjamin Button, an uncanny-valley point-by-point rip off of the already terrible Forrest Grump storyline that left me not just cold, but itchy to get out of a theater and never deal with it again. Rewatching this, it's good enough that I'm almost tempted to try Button one more time... but even the thought of it is unpleasant, so I guess that probably won't happen for a long while. Very excited for The Social Network, though. That feels like a very Zodiac story waiting to unfold.

Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö / The Match Factory Girl

Following the order of the "Proletariat Trilogy" (only a trilogy in a thematic sense, thankfully), this one builds on the tone of the last two to be sure. The main difference that I see, the thing that separates this from its predecessors, is that Iris (the match factory girl in question) is the only main character in any of the three stories not already hardened by a certain kind of hopeless acceptance (read: surrender). She's still vulnerable, soft, and more to the point victimizable, because she's still full of hope and dreams. Part of what made Shadows in Paradise and Ariel interesting to me was the nonchalant hopelessness of the world, the way the characters had already given up trying, and took things like doors of opportunity opening up only to slam shut in their faces (in both case, due to untimely deaths) as part-and-parcel of what the universe had to offer. Notably in Shadows, within the first ten minutes, Nikander's friend and would-be benefactor says, "I'm not going to die behind the wheel." Nikander asks him, "Then where?" and without the slightest hint of irony or hesitation, he declares, "Behind a desk." There's no hope of avoiding misery and frustration and isolation. There's just choosing what you do in the meantime and how you go out. I think the reason Nikander and Kasurinen are able to find love is because they've accepted this, and so have the women they meet, and the romances are hilariously cold, straightforward, and gloomy. More like two people embracing so as not to freeze to death (so quickly) than two people hoping for any kind of joy from one another.

Iris, though, she hopes for something more. She's young, naive, and believes in love, and for that we watch her get punished by the world. What saves this from being an endlessly cruel story is her third-act turnaround, her (SPOILER) transformation (by failed suicide-by-auto?) from innocent starry-eyed wallflower into black comedy murderess. There's no question this one ups the blackness and the comedy from the last two. And it works, and it's funny -- and it's so streamlined, at 68 minutes long, that it couldn't possibly overstay its welcome. Plus, it helped me think out some "solitary humorous-pathetic" moments for the script I'm working on. Yet personally, I think my favorite of the three lies somewhere between Shadows and Ariel, somewhere closer to humor-from-hopelessness rather than humor-from-the-world's-cruelty. But I still love all three, and don't understand why nobody else knows of this guy. He falls into the same category as Teshigahara and Hong Sang-soo and many others, foreign filmmakers who are underrated (here), all tough to sell people on, but so rewarding once you bother. I guess I'll just keep pushing.

Red Road

I put it on for the voyeurism and the infiltrating-another's-world angles, basically for act one's and act two's hooks, respectively, as they kind of feel like they make this film exist in the fuzzy space between the short script I'm putting together and the feature I've been working on lately. But of course Red Road isn't a film you watch casually, and once you sink into that world, well it's just like Jackie and her pain: the only way out is through.

The immersiveness of the world is one thing, but what really pulls you in is the character herself, with so much history and conflicted, confused feelings -- the primary mystery of the story is why she's doing what she's doing, and as she solves smaller mysteries (like why Clyde is doing what he's doing) we work to piece together her backstory. This works so well because the character's obtuse motivation isn't just some dramatic trick of withholding vital information for the sake of a twist; it's reflective of her own state. She doesn't know what her intentions are with Clyde, and seems to flirt with every possible emotional response within each scene. Keeping the backstory from us puts us more in her shoes. If you told us up front the nature of her interest in Clyde (and it's not like there aren't enough clues we can't get the gist of it pretty quick) we'd be busy moralizing and putting our own emotional desires ahead of hers. Since we're unsure just how she knows him or just what he's done to her, we wonder how far she's able, or willing, or even justified, to go -- just as she is wondering herself. Of course it also gives us a nice third-act reveal, as with any good mystery it all comes together at the end, and Jackie's catharsis feels genuine and earned, most likely because it isn't easy or cut-and-dry. She punishes him, cleverly and savagely, and then she forgives him, and then she reaches out to him. And tellingly, he does the same to her, in small ways, before they wander away from each other and back to their worlds -- he to his estranged daughter and petty crime and poverty, she to her authoritarian dayjob and ghosts and loving in-laws, impatiently waiting for her to finally begin the mourning process.

I wanted to say more about style and tone, as I'm kind of watching films with that in mind, and this one has a lot to chew on, but I pretty much filled up my quota and then some talking about the characters and drama -- and since that's where my heart really lies, I'll just let it be that Red Road is a film with both stylistic whizbang (haven't seen use of awkward video this good since 28 Days Later) and dramatic punch, but like it often does, the content trumped the style. Hard to complain about that.

Ariel

For the first fifteen minutes or so of this film, it felt suspiciously like Aki Kaurismäki took the beat sheet from Shadows in Paradise and wrote new scenes with the exact same impact/plot, but when it veers away it's very satisfying. On the one hand it's fun to see the same style of story with ratcheted-up tension and stakes, almost like a more commercial "bleak-comedy" about desperate losers finding love. On the other, though, it makes for an interesting what-if, as things go from bad to worse and from worse to a lot worse, only to (SPOILER?) kind of work out in the end.

I'm really focusing more on tone and style than story, though, and there's a lot to digest here. Ariel feels funnier than Shadows (though my one big laugh was very meta, when Matti Pellonpää shows up sitting in a jail cell, looking almost exactly like he did in the last film... for a minute I expected him to introduce himself as Nikander, and for us to learn that things didn't end so well for him and Ilona), but also a lot darker, opening on a suicide and having so many guns and knives, thieves and robbers, throughout. The story consistently offers sight gags and ironic twists to keep the audience from overdosing on hopelessness, and like I think I said last time, what really saves it is that Kaurismäki isn't afraid to laugh at losers suffering desperation. It's the tenet of every writer worth his salt that the hero is the one who suffers the most -- sometimes it feels like you have an obligation to make as many things as you can go wrong -- but here we are invited to chuckle every time it does. It's as if he's saying "Look how depressing... isn't that funny?"

I wonder if there's any way I can pull this off in my story. I sure hope so, because this is the tone I'm going for here.

Stardust Memories

It's hard to believe this is the first Woody Allen film I've seen this year. It was picked essentially because I knew I hadn't seen it in a while and it was a mid-era piece, one of the Three Favorites (he's famously said that only three of his films turned out exactly how he wanted them: if memory serves it was this, Purple Rose of Cairo and Match Point). I'd seen a handful of Woody Allen movies over the years of course, but I wasn't in love with any of them (not even Annie Hall... though as a kid I loved Sleeper) until my first in-theater Woody Allen experience, which was Deconstructing Harry. Somehow that opened me up to the world of Woody Allen, and I began falling in love with his older films as well. To this day Deconstructing Harry remains one of my favorite and most-watched of his. I bring this up because Stardust Memories feels in so many ways like the same film.

In a way that goes way beyond mere auteurism in filmmaking, Stardust and Harry take the same approach to the same story. In the former, he's a filmmaker being celebrated at a weekend-long event, and the story is intercut with expressionistic vignettes, purportedly scenes from the films made by his fictional character (Sandy Bates), while the story explores the three major relationships in his life and the nature and value of his work. In the latter, he's a novelist being honored somewhat ironically at a university he dropped out of, and the story is intercut with expressionistic vignettes, purportedly scenes from the novels written by his fictional character (Harry Block), while the story explores the three(ish) major relationships in his life and the nature and value of his work. (Further, they're both Wild Strawberries; but Woody Allen riffing on plots by Bergman -- who'd have guessed?) The main difference seems to be that in Stardust his adoring fans are ubiquitous, an unavoidable torrent of love and awkward conversations, and the primary conflict is in his shift from bright comedy into deeper, more thoughtful dramatic territory; and in Harry his fans never make an appearance, and the primary conflict is that his work too closely mirrors his own life and constantly gets him into trouble with the loved ones whose quirks or natures he exaggerates for effect.

I know Woody Allen says his films are decidedly not autobiographical and that he hates the idea that people read them that way, but come on. In 1980, when Stardust Memories came out, it was his fourth "more mature" film, including the challenging-at-the-time Annie Hall and Manhattan, and the somber Interiors. How can there be no autobiography in a story about a well known director of comedies segueing into Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman homages as he explores issues of psychology, existentialism, and the idea of perfect love, whose fans are still yearning for the days when he made silly comedies? And then, seventeen years later, after fighting the "this film isn't about me, it's just a story I made up" battle for almost two decades, along comes Deconstructing Harry, a film about an author burning every bridge by writing a little too close to what he knows. I try to respect an artist at their word, at least about the intent of their work (even if I often disregard their intent as tangential to the value of the content of their work), but I find it impossible to watch a Woody Allen story and not view it as self-derived, and wonderfully, honestly, multi-dimensionally so. Like it or not, I don't think any other filmmaker alive approaches the themes and nature of their own life and work with the kind of candor that Woody Allen has for decades. Not every film he makes is a gem, especially these days, and dare I say it: I wish he'd stop rushing one out every year and spend a couple of years per film, really perfecting it -- because when he's on, when he does make a gem, it's an instant classic, a piece of the canon not to be ignored. For me, Stardust Memories is one of those instant-classic gems.

The Black Hole

Everything about this film feels dated, from another era -- even wistful and naive. The effects don't quite hold up, the acting is hit-and-miss, the dialogue less than nuanced, and the science... well, it's important to remember this film was made nine years before Stephen Hawking starting releasing books. They do (quite casually) use terms like "event horizon," which shows that they did their research, so that's something. Anyway, my point with all this isn't that The Black Hole sucks. I was actually trying to build up to saying, everything about this film feels dated, and yet it's pretty damn spectacular if you can overlook that. The plot is thoughtful and epic in scope and (if you disregard some unmotivated shifts in personality) very character-driven -- and it's darker than anything else I think Disney's ever done. It's brutal, Nietzschean dark, one part 20,000 Leagues and one part Heart of Darkness with Reinhardt playing the Übermensch/Nemo/Kurtz who has stared long and hard into that abyss (black hole) and found it staring back. The things he has done are fairly horrific, even by today's standards of dramatic villainy, and the portrayal of him as a man (as literally as ever) on the edge of an infinite madness is rich and frightening.

Plus, the look of it: The Black Hole's special effects don't hold up, but the art direction holds up wonderfully. The look of the shots, costumes, robot and ship designs, even the look of asteroids and black holes, as unscientific as they are -- the style of this film is fucking beautiful. The end includes a twisted 2001-esque journey through a wormhole into heaven and hell, and a somberly paced bit of mind-fucking visual poetry as Reinholdt and his nightmarish second-in-command robot Maximillian embrace in a fiery whorl of zero-gravity, only to merge into a single being that's last seen standing atop a mountain, as though victorious, overlooking the fiery landscape of hell, while a small army of mirror-faced zombie-drone-monk-bots are gathered at the foot of the mountain. And even that, the lingering image of this hybrid-creature's closeup reveals Reinholdt's eyes inside Maximillian's visor are furtive, almost panicky -- a man trapped inside a monstrous machine? That's a lot to ingest when you're a kid, and that shit sticks with you. And it's not something a movie would do with its last act now.

Every time I put this on, which is about once every three or so years, I begin with mild embarrassment and curiosity because of the odd balance of what holds up and what doesn't, and by the end I am again unnerved and invigorated by the sheer tenacity of the story and its characters and world. TRON may have the bigger following, but there's a reason that for years I've been arguing that these two films showed a bolder, more intelligent side of Disney and of science fiction cinema, than much of anything that's come since. In both these films, there are so many layers of metaphor and meaning to be found in its seeming pulpy simplicity, and both feel daring and original in their way. I keep using the word, but I really think it applies here: The Black Hole is visual poetry, and I totally love it.

Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise)

There's a scene late in Shadows in Paradise when our hero Nikander, having won and lost his ferociously tepid love Ilona, where he's back at his night job translating English recordings into Finnish (or at least that's what I think he's doing). The snippet we catch goes as follows: "I was pretty well through with the subject. I'd probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them. It's funny. It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun too, to be in love. Do you think so?" It's a strange monologue, and when he tries to play it back he finds it unbearable. He cannot face the lines, and he leaves his job abruptly, work unfinished. These lines are so awkwardly spot-on about this beautifully awkward story that they are jarring, confrontational, and yet they read like so many opaque lines of stereo instructions that you're not sure if you even got the meaning right. Maybe you imagined that it summed up the movie, but it felt like it did.

The tone here is just so delicate. I've never felt more invited to laugh at deadpan sadsacks as when watching an Aki Kaurismäki film, but it's never all that funny. What I didn't remember, and now find amazingly obvious, is how proto-Jarmuschian this is, reminding me of Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Limits of Control, and of course the similarly titled Stranger Than Paradise. Everything from little details like her portable stereo and the way they smoke to the general tone to the sedate way things never really boil over, and of course the more-bleak-than-black sense of humor. It's all very like where Jim Jarmusch would go, and curiously (but separately?) this film feels amazingly like a solution to a problem of tone and pacing to one of my scripts (The World of Missing Persons, only so noted in case I come back wondering). It's matter-of-fact and slice-of-life but with a tinge of absurdism. I really like it, even though on a certain level it seems (absurdly) like I'm watching cinema's first Aspergers romance. I'll have to revisit this one in the future when I get back to that script. Between Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson (Songs of the Second Floor and You, the Living), it seems like I'm constantly being inspired for my own films by contemporary Scandinavian cinema. Like I said, bleak-comic absurdism. I wonder what else is out there.

For now, sorry if my thoughts are all over the place. I had to crawl out of bed to write this, and now I'm going back to it. What are you gonna do?

Män som hatar kvinnor / The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo *

Boy, it's telling that the original Swedish title of both the film and the source novel is Men Who Hate Women. I guess the more direct Sweden Is Rapeland just wouldn't have sold enough copies (or movie tickets), huh?

In short, this film is very good, a good ol' mystery story that turns fairly cleverly and pretty smoothly into a serial killer story, with a likable odd-couple as the intrepid detectives. More than one moment in the story felt almost unbearably tense, and the whole "scanning the internet or scouring old logbooks for clues" stuff was never as boring as it might have been. I genuinely liked both the protagonists and enjoyed their tense tete-â-tete, and if the film's final solutions (no Nazi pun intended) felt somewhat obvious from the get-go, the script doesn't punish you by beating you over the head with it. I get the impression they half expected you to beat the characters to the conclusions they come to, and that's okay. It's still about the drama of getting there.

I know this is a world-famous much-hyped novel series right now, and so I assume in all those extra pages they must explain the biggest nagging question the film left me with, which is why the hell did Lisbeth get involved in the case in the first place? She was hired to hack his stuff, she did that, she found him trustworthy, okay, but what drive does a girl this guarded and this dangerous (and borderline self-destructive) have to continue pursuing Mikael's remote-accessed laptop once she's delivered files to her bosses? Then to expose herself to him because she's answered a riddle he hasn't... I mean, I get that part of her just wanted to rub it in his face that she's smarter, but this is more. She puts herself out there like she never has before, and there's got to be some missing scene or chapter or pages that explains this huge bold move to us, right? Because once she's in, I am hooked right alongside her (and him), I can see why you wouldn't let up, but I can find no reason inside the story for her to cross that first threshold, and that really frustrates me.

And seriously, I think the ratio of Nazis, serial rapists, or Nazi-serial-rapist/serial-killers to nice guys in this movie is about 2:1 or maybe even 3:1. I enjoyed that Women Getting Revenge never overshadowed the interpersonal drama stuff or the main whodunnit plot, but there was a certain theme of Men Are Monsters here that felt, frankly, disappointingly one-sided. Never once were we given a deeper motive for any of the monstrosities against women except "it feels good." (SPOILER) The religious/Nazi thing was even dismissed by all but the dead father. Men simply do these things because those men are "evil," and that's less terrifying and more didactic than this film deserves.

I did, though, quite like some of the thematic repetitions throughout, like the unfortunate nature of a "photographic memory" and Lisbeth's inability to forget the minutest detail of the things she'd suffered through (echoed back to her as she videotapes her own brutal rape). And I enjoyed that Lisbeth was shown as still capable, in her own guarded way, of loving -- both physically and emotionally -- despite the trauma she'd suffered through. Often with rape-victim movies and especially with rape-victim movies where the rapists are depicted as un-nuanced forces of evil, the victim's suffering permeates every facet of their being in a way that leaves no room for character or color. Here it shades her, but she still feels like a developed and three-dimensional human being, and that goes a long way toward redeeming the story's flatness of the villains for me. In fact, I would have loved to spend more time in the conflicted and contradictory psychology of the title character, in light of where she's been, who she is now, and the kind of future Mikael's stability and quiet acceptance seems to be offering her. I found that more enthralling than the actual murder investigation, but then again like I said, it seemed clear to me from the get-go that Harriet was still alive -- and besides, I've always gone more for character than for plot, if push comes to shove.


Seen at the Laurelhurst Theater.

L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)

A couple of years ago my friend Myrrh introduced me to this long-neglected French classic. This morning was, I believe, the third time I've watched the film straight through, and maybe if you count up all the fragmented times I've seen parts of it, this may have been the fourth or even fifth time I've seen most scenes, and only now is it starting to cohere for me into something of a film experience. That is to say, now I feel like I can talk about it. Now I can make something of a theory or two about Last Year at Marienbad.

Obviously it plays out in a kind of "dreamlike" surreal atmosphere, none of it meant to feel naturalistic or exactly literal. In fact, all those silly parodies of black-and-white art films set around fountains and in statue gardens of bored aristocrats repeating nonsensical phrases and looking very posed that you see in TV shows, cartoons, perfume commercials... well, it's all right here. 8 1/2 a little bit, maybe, but mostly that all comes straight from this. But here (as in Fellini's film) all that easily-mockable repetition and stiffness is to a purpose. Like the film's main characters who cannot remember what happened where, I think we are meant to view Marienbad through the filter of faulty memory. The looped dialogue, the repeated imagery and cuts from one location to another mid-turn, the circular logic and endless disorienting architecture makes remembering what happened where, and in what order, almost impossible. You remember this film the way you remember a dream, unsure of the chronology, the characters, the relationships. He was coming to run away with her, and she wanted it, but also she didn't know him, and he might have been coming to attack her, but also she'd been murdered by a jealous husband, but that couldn't be, was she even married? This is how you describe dreams when you wake from them, eventually deciding on whatever elements resonated strongest and seem to recur most often in your memory of it, but you're never completely sure if you're remembering how it "was" in your dream, or how you want it to be when you wake. This isn't very different from remembering an idyllic (or emotionally volatile) vacation a year back, is it? Or a relationship from a while ago? You start piecing it together and you realize the chronology doesn't add up, or you left out the part where you were fighting on the bannister, and when you try to reinsert a remembered element into whatever fixed narrative you've made of your memories, the whole thing crumbles. You look at the pieces of memory, the fragments you're certain of, and the more you look the less you trust those, until everything becomes a kind of memory-kipple. I know no other film that better portrays the disorientation and fragmentation of remembering (a dream, the past, anything) than this.

There's one detail that always sticks with me and both illustrates and enriches this theme. I love the recurring part of the story with the husband, the man in black, named only M (the woman is A, the man chasing her, X) playing the matchstick game. It reminds our hero -- and us -- of a looming threat, a sense of doom, by telling us that there are nearly infinite iterations possible, but all of them end with the man in black winning. He always wins. You will always lose. You can remember it seven trillion different ways, but they all lead you right here, where you've lost whatever you're trying to regain through memory. No matter which matchsticks you grab for and in which order, the outcome is always the same.

Days of Heaven

Well, I've been talking about sensual filmmaking, right-brain stuff, and I felt this was a good time to finally watch Days of Heaven. After reading how it took two years to edit, and Malick couldn't find a way to put it all together until he ditched the majority of the dialogue and relied on Linda to voiceover the story with oblique narration, that certainly sounds like a precursor to how Wong Kar-Wai would work two decades later. (Of note because Wong Kar-Wai's "cinema jazz" style is one of the easiest examples of "Sensualist filmmaking" I know of. Wish I could take credit for this idea, but it's ripped directly from Salon.com's Matt Zoller Seitz.)

The way the story slides by with all this imagery and visual metaphor, never quite slipping into dream-like or merely poetic (that is to say, the imagery never falls into the abstract) is hypnotic, and the sparseness of the narrative is more than made up for by the richness of the experience. The less you tell me, the more I discover for myself, and the more I discover for myself, the richer the film has become. Glances that mean realization, framing that tells me how a character feels, a snippet in the middle of a conversation about one thing tells me that another thing has already been discussed, or is pointedly not being discussed: it all feeds a hungry audience, it all gives you handles so you can do the heavy lifting for yourself. This is classic show-don't-tell filmmaking.

One easy, concrete example of not-spelling-it-out that really stuck with me is early on, when Bill is trying to convince Abby to offer herself to the farmer, but he doesn't convince her by saying, "We could be rich and happy if you just do this one small thing," because that's so painfully direct it loses its impact -- both to Abby and to the audience. Instead he justifies it by simply saying he's sick of her struggling, not having anything, having to work in the fields all day. Already he's saying "I'm doing this for you," but we have to look for that message in his words. Then he continues, saying how much he hates that the other workers leer at her, bent over in the fields, ogling her like she's some kind of a whore. This is Bill suggesting that her current life is degrading, humiliating, and she is "as low as a whore" that she (and he) can't stop everyone from eyeing her lasciviously. The solution, the rise in dignity that Bill is suggesting, comes through actual whoring, through actually giving herself up quietly in the manner in which he fears it looks almost as though she already is. This is irony, this is commentary, this is bittersweet recognition of the human condition, and it's all right there for the plucking, all this layered meaning -- but the only thing Bill says is he's tired of her having to work, and he hates how men leer at her. The rest, the audience can easily put together, and by not having him just come out and say these things, the understanding we get is richer. It's broader and deeper and the whole experience of the film is more intimate.

Days of Heaven isn't sensual or "right-brained" in a nonlinear or surreal/abstract way. It's sensual in that it gives itself to the watcher and lets the watcher do the left-brain stuff. You just have to feel it out, live in the movie alongside these characters, fill in those gaps naturally, organically. (All of this sounds like I'm describing the recently watched Denis film 35 Shots of Rum.) In a sense, and I know how limiting (and paradoxically left-brained of me) it is to put it this way, but you could argue that Days of Heaven is "right-brained" because it never tells you a story; all it does is show you.